By Angus Dalton
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The life-saving ability to track and forecast cyclones is just one of the areas the science community fears will suffer in the fallout of US President Donald Trump’s rampage through American science and research organisations.
Trump has withdrawn funding for research that mentions climate and purged government websites of critical climate data.
Trump’s staffing cuts to a key US meteorological agency threatens data used by Australia to monitor severe weather.Credit: Aresna Villanueva
He attempted to cancel or freeze tens of billions of dollars’ worth of research funding and wants to slash $US4 billion from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.
Trump’s ban on funding “woke” research has also killed off studies focused on gender and health. One researcher was shut down merely for gathering data on the sexual orientation and gender of cancer patients.
The editorial board of the world’s most highly regarded academic journal, Nature, scorched Trump’s edicts as “Orwellian” and an “unprecedented assault on science”.
“An assault on science and scientists anywhere is an assault on science and scientists everywhere,” the editorial continued.
People protest the Trump administration’s science policies and federal job cuts in Chicago.Credit: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh
Now we know just how much that warning holds true, as scientists at Australian universities have been pressed for information by US agencies. Here’s how Trump’s chaos is reaching our shores.
The scale of Australia’s reliance on US partners
The US is Australia’s largest research partner. The US government provided $A386 million in research funding involving Australian organisations in 2024, according to the Australian Academy of Science – equivalent to 43 per cent of the funding provided each year by the Australian Research Council.
A quarter of our biomedical and clinical science findings, and 40 per cent of Australian publications on the physical sciences, are made alongside US collaborators.
“This includes research in strategic areas including quantum science, space science and other sciences that underpin AUKUS Pillar II advanced capabilities and Australia’s critical technologies list,” says president of the academy, Professor Chennupati Jagadish.
He released a statement on Monday urging the Albanese government to safeguard Australian research from the Trump administration’s disruption.
In the field of atmospheric science and extreme weather forecasting, the importance of American collaboration is “huge”, says the president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Dr Martin Singh.
Professor Chennupati Jagadish says the federal government must act on possible foreign influence by the US on Australian science.
“Almost everyone collaborates internationally. Our field is quite small here. Making collaboration harder will really hurt our science,” says Singh, a climate scientist from Monash University.
He is part of a team collaborating with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory – where modern climate modelling was partly pioneered – to predict exactly how climate change will warp future day-to-day weather.
“How is the actual weather going to change? Are we going to get different types of storms? Are we going to get more storms like [Cyclone] Alfred? That’s the cutting edge of climate research right now.”
But with NOAA gutted by the Trump administration’s job cuts and funding freezes, Singh and his team don’t know if the collaboration will continue. It’s just one example of thousands of potentially life-saving research projects paralysed by the chaos.
Ideology trumping science
US agencies have also quizzed Australian scientists at several universities on whether they have funding links to China, Iran, Russia and Cuba, The Australian Financial Review reported last week. The National Tertiary Education Union blasted the 36-question survey as “blatant foreign interference”.
The survey prompted scientists to confirm their research had no links to diversity, equity and inclusion or climate change, and asked what the impact their work had on preventing illegal immigration to the US and combatting Christian persecution.
Sample of questions put to Australian researchers
Can you confirm that your organization has not received ANY funding from the PRC (including Confucius Institutes and/or partnered with Chinese state or non-state actors), Russia, Cuba, or Iran?
Can you confirm that this is no DEI project or DEI elements of the project?
Can you confirm this is not a climate or “environmental justice” project or include such elements?
Does this project take appropriate measures to protect women and to defend against gender ideology as defined in the below Executive Order?
What impact does this project have on limiting the flow of fentanyl, synthetic drugs, and pre-cursor chemicals into the U.S.?
“If responses to the survey lead to reductions or cessation of US-Australian scientific collaborations, it will directly threaten our scientific and technological capability and diminish Australia’s strategic capability in areas of national interest such as defence, health, disaster mitigation and response, AI and quantum technology,” Jagadish says.
Professor Ian Hickie, co-director of health and policy at the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre, says the future of Australian medical research is “tied very strongly” to what happens in the US.
“The general factor has been one of chaos and also intimidation, really, of staff,” he says.
Professor Ian Hickie, co-director of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre, says Trump’s edicts of science sparked “chaos and also intimidation”.Credit: Steven Siewert
Hickie says ideology is trumping science, referencing US government criticism of anti-depressants. One of Trump’s executive orders demanded an assessment of the “threat” of SSRI antidepressants.
“Elon Musk has often written that common SSRIs are dangerous, but ketamine is great, and there should be more ketamine and psychedelics,” Hickie, a psychiatrist, says.
“The idea that certain studies or lines of research will be politically driven to reach a foregone conclusion is a source of great concern.”
The long-term worry is that this period of turmoil could knock out a generation of scientific talent.
“Many people in lower level scientific positions have just had their contracts terminated directly or they’ve had grants withdrawn,” Hickie says. “The next generation of researchers is really being directly targeted.”
Exposed to deadly weather systems
US agencies including NOAA and NASA are both in Trump’s firing line. Australia relies greatly on the data they gather; both organisations helped track Cyclone Alfred off the east coast this month and the Bureau of Meteorology partly drew on their findings to help provide early warnings days before extreme weather struck cities.
NOAA’s 4000-strong fleet of floating robots, which can dive 6000 metres deep, are instrumental to our understanding of potential disasters such as Alfred. The “Argo” robots have tracked sea temperatures and fed that data into forecasting for a quarter of a century.
SES personnel tracking cyclone Alfred in early March.Credit: Kate Geraghty
But after staffing cuts of up to 20 per cent at NOAA, there are fears the floats might not be maintained. Ten per cent of the robots require replacement each year. And there’s far more operational firepower at stake within the organisation.
“Without US collaboration, Australia would lose the benefit of an early warning system, impacting our ability to prepare Australians for adverse weather events,” Jagadish says.
US data is “essential for disaster resilience and responses that save Australian lives”, he says.
The Bureau of Meteorology says it is in close daily contact with NOAA but has not said whether extreme weather forecasting could be impacted by the cuts.
That’s just one possible impact of Trump’s siege on science. What else might happen is difficult to forecast.
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